Tuesday, 7 March 2017

'No Man's Sky' Just Announced Another Big Update, But Do We Care at This Point?

The strange, tragic saga of the onetime indie gaming darling No Man's Sky continues with Hello Games' announcement today of a new patch due out this week. According to a post on the Steam forums, it's called the Path Finder Update, and apparently it adds a new vehicle that "will aid home planet exploration." The brief 135-word post says little else besides a promise of more detailed patch notes to come and an acknowledgement that the team addressed some issues players reported pertaining to the previous update.

It's nice to see that Hello Games is living up to its promise to continue updating its game, but does anyone really care at this point? In the whirlwind of news about the Nintendo Switch, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and other fascinating exploration games like Horizon: Zero Dawn, No Man's Sky feels a bit like ancient news. And neither is the Path Finder Update all that spectacular. We noted in our coverage of November's Foundation Update that the patch's key features still left No Man's Sky as "essentially the same game," and the Path Finder Update appears to do much the same, only this time with a car to explore a bunch of planets that barely differ significantly from one another. And seven months later, there's still no proper multiplayer action.

Hello Games will need to do much more than include a buggy if it wants its players to return. Infamously, No Man's Sky's numbers as reported by SteamDB have been plummeting since the very beginning, droppingly wildly from more than 212,000 concurrent players on Steam on launch day to around 19,000 by the end of the month. Today, the numbers are even more dire, as SteamDB shows its most recent 24-hour peak for concurrent players reached only a pitiful 527. The appeal, as strong as it once was, is gone.

No Man's Sky burst on the scene with the promise of unlimited worlds to explore. Unfortunately, with all that on offer, players have found that there are far more interesting worlds out there than these.

from 'No Man's Sky' Just Announced Another Big Update, But Do We Care at This Point?